Students must have taken at least one Writers Studio class in order to register. This class is for memoir writers only.

This virtual six-week workshop focuses on exploring different persona narrators for memoir. Writers will come on the first week with a two-page scene or vignette and, over the course of the class, “audition” four radically different narrators using the same material. Each week, the class will examine how shifts in narrators help students connect to their material and maintain the narrative distance needed to reveal their stories. Using different narrative techniques or devices each week allows writers to look at their material through new and often emotionally inspiring lenses. This practice also allows students to begin to develop emotional range and a particular style. In the final week, participants will submit a revised version of their piece, informed by the narrator that proved the strongest fit for their material, i.e., the one that most fully unlocked the emotional core of their story. This class is open to memoir writers.

Class Structure & Details

Format: Weekly, unrecorded live classes via Google Meet

What to Expect: Writers come on the first week with a two-page scene or vignette. On subsequent weeks, students bring in exercises, using different narrative techniques with the same material. In the final week, participants submit a revised version of their piece, informed by the narrator that proved the strongest fit for their material. All weekly feedback is provided orally during the Google Meet session.

Who Can Join: This class is open to students writing memoir who have taken at least one Writers Studio class.

📌 Note: Our Google Meet sessions are highly interactive and designed to be a safe space for sharing fresh work, so they are not recorded.

Instructor

Writers Studio Teacher

Sylvie Bertrand

Sylvie Bertrand's stories and poems have appeared in Peregrine Journal, Epiphany, Cleaver Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, Alexandria Quarterly, and December magazine, among others. She was nominated for the 2017 Pen / Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, received a 2018 Pushcart Special Mention, and was a finalist for the 2019 Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize. Sylvie is the co-founding editor of Cagibi, an online and print literary journal. She studied with Philip Schultz at The Writers Studio and has degrees in Communications and Literature, Political Sciences, and a MA in Anthropology from Princeton University. She is working on a hybrid collection of fiction and memoir about language, disappearance, self-invention, and what gets left behind.

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